Moving parts: reconfiguring corporeal difference and the human through organ transplant narratives

Organ transplantation materially reconfigures the biological boundaries between bodies, but it also reshapes the social and ethical possibilities of using certain bodies as resources for the lives of others. In its physical reorganizing of the fleshy material of bodies, it conjures up vivid associations and rearticulations of the relationship between self and other, of the individualist Enlightenment subject, and of what it even means to be and have a human body. Moving Parts examines how associations and rearticulations like these are represented in literature, television, theater, and film. In examining the stories that circulate around the most fundamental questions about the organ transplant’s possibility, I argue that we can see how narrative constructs the body as knowable subject. Moving Parts contends that these modes of narrativizing the act of organ transfer are indicative of a pervasive preoccupation not simply with a technology that drastically reorganizes how bodies relate to one another in the materiality of their flesh, but also with the very strategies these stories deploy in order to narratologically negotiate this radical corporeal reconfiguration. I argue that the organ transplant should be understood as a discourse, a profound transformation of bodies where the objectified other is the very thing that allows for the continued life of the self. It is a discourse through which we may understand the self to always have been a precarious construct teetering between healthy and individual and ailing and contingent. In the face of a technology that demands a radical understanding of the borders of between self and other, the stories I examine in Moving Parts allow us to think a human subject that must begin beyond where the body ends in order to resist the liberal humanist discourses that produce debased others premised on corporeal difference.